Faith Rodgers says she was mentally, physically and verbally abused by R Kelly, who she was in a relationship with for almost a year, according to the lawsuit filed yesterday.

A representative for the singer said in April that he "categorically denies all claims and allegations" in the lawsuit.

In an emotional interview with the BBC, Faith described R Kelly's alleged sexual misconduct.

In May 2017, Faith says R Kelly flew her to New York to attend one of his concerts. She says she received a phone call at 6am from the singer, who came to her hotel room and ordered her to take off her clothes.

She describes his behaviour towards her as “really aggressive” and says she “froze up” when R Kelly attempted to initiate sexual activity.

“I told him that I wasn’t ready for sex, that I don’t engage in sex the first time I meet somebody - that’s not who I am, that’s not what I’m comfortable with,” she says.

Faith claims the singer then shrugged his shoulders and responded that he was “at his best” when he was “wanted”.

At that point, she says she thought it had been established that she didn’t want to have sex with him.

R Kelly then began rubbing Faith’s back like he was “rubbing a countertop”, she says.

She claims he went on to initiate sex with Faith while saying “nasty [and] degrading things” to her. Faith also claims that R Kelly referred to himself as “Daddy” and called her “his little doll” during the encounter.

A #MuteRKelly movement established in July 2017 calls for a boycott of the Grammy Award-winning singer’s music and concerts. The singer has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

In a statement issued in April by R Kelly's management, he called the string of allegations – and the subsequent backlash from the Time’s Up movement – “a greedy, conscious, and malicious conspiracy to demean him, his family and the women with whom he spends his time”.

Music streaming services, including Spotify and Apple, have removed R Kelly’s songs from some of their playlists, and a petition calling for a “worldwide mute” on the singer has attracted more than 70,000 signatures.

In the interview, which is one of several with R Kelly’s alleged victims as part of a new BBC Three documentary, Faith claims that the singer forced her to perform oral sex and endure humiliating sexual encounters.

She describes one of those encounters, which she says took place at a concert.

“It was backstage and they were calling him to come on stage; he wasn’t worried about it. He pulled my pants down, bent me in front of a mirror, he had me by my neck and he just penetrated me and started having sex with me.

“It was rough. It hurt,” she says.

Faith claims she discovered that she had contracted herpes.

“I was devastated,” she says. “I was embarrassed; it’s not something that’s going to go away.

“The hardest part was coming clean to my family about everything […] I blame myself a lot.”

On other occasions, R Kelly instructed her to perform sexually while he filmed her on his iPad, she claims.

“He turned on all the lights, pulled out his iPad, and told me to get naked. He was demanding that I do stuff on camera that I wasn’t comfortable doing whatsoever.”

During their relationship, Faith says R Kelly also asked her to sign a contract that he said would offer him “protection”. She did not sign the agreement.

Faith says she was introduced to a circle of women who R Kelly described as his “family”, and who all referred to him as “Daddy”. She says they followed a series of rules set by the singer like standing up, walking to him and kissing him on the mouth whenever he entered the room.

She describes some members of R Kelly’s inner circle as “puppets” who have been brainwashed.

Their daughter, Bobbi Kristina Brown, died at a hospice in 2015 at the age of 22, six months after she was found unresponsive in a bath.

Film writer and producer Kaleem Aftab was among those to praise the film.

Owen Gleiberman, film critic at Variety, wrote: "We don't necessarily need another documentary to remind us of what a powerful and transformative singer Whitney Houston was. Whitney does something more essential: It plunges into the 'Why?' and comes up with a shatteringly convincing answer."

Tom Grierson, writing in Screen Daily, wrote: "Whitney is strongest when it connects Houston to the larger history of Black America, illustrating how this glamorous performer grew up in poverty and never entirely escaped the obligation of helping to pull up her underprivileged family members."

The Times's Ed Potton gave it a four-star review while The Telegraph's Tim Robey was more lukewarm, giving it three stars and writing: "The film is oddly unmoving as a memorial, but as with Amy Winehouse, it inspires a collective mea culpa for the feeding frenzy of public judgement that only turned to sympathy when it was far too late."

David Rooney, a critic for The Hollywood Reporter, wrote: "It's a riveting narrative, and even those not among Houston's more passionate fan base will find it an emotionally wrenching experience."

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art rolled out the red carpet for the Met Gala, the annual opening party for its spring exhibition. The invite-only event is also a fundraiser for the museum's Costume Institute.

Singers Katy Perry and Rihanna wore some of the night's most memorable ensembles. Perry donned six-foot angel wings to pair with a metallic gold Versace mini dress and Rihanna seemed to channel the pope, wearing a pearl and jewel-encrusted mitre and robe designed by Margiela.

Emmy award-winning writer Lena Waithe stood out in a rainbow-flag cape designed by Carolina Herrera, among the celestial gold and silver dresses. The bold look was praised on Twitter.

This year's show will put the focus on fashion and works of medieval art, in what the Met describes as a thematic exhibition examining "fashion's ongoing engagement with the devotional practices and traditions of Catholicism."

Papal robes and accessories on loan from the Vatican will be appear alongside designers Dolce & Gabanna, Versace, Chanel, Balenciaga and Valentino. The exhibition opens to the public on May 10 and runs through October 8, 2018

]]>webmaster@cbc.bb (Super User)ENTERTAINMENTTue, 08 May 2018 13:24:56 -0400Jay-Z's mum: ‘I was not free’ until I told son I was gayhttp://cbc.bb/index.php/news/entertainment/item/4755-jay-z-s-mum-i-was-not-free-until-i-told-son-i-was-gay
http://cbc.bb/index.php/news/entertainment/item/4755-jay-z-s-mum-i-was-not-free-until-i-told-son-i-was-gay

Jay-Z's mum has spoken of how supportive her son was when she told him she was gay.

Gloria Carter told an audience at the GLAAD Media Awards that it was the first time she's spoken to anyone about who she really was.

The mother-of-four was presented with a special recognition gong for her contribution to his song Smile, released last year.

She said: "Smile became a reality because I shared with my son who I am."

"My son cried and said: 'It must have been horrible to live that way for so long.'"

"My life wasn't horrible," she added.

"I chose to protect my family from ignorance. I was happy but I was not free."

Jay-Z has previously told how he cried with joy when his mother spoke to him about being a lesbian and of being in love with her female partner.

In the song on the rapper's latest 4:44 album he says: "Mama had four kids, but she's a lesbian/Had to pretend so long that she's a thespian. Had to hide in the closet, so she medicate/Society shame and the pain was too much to take."

He told US talk show host David Letterman: "For my mother to have to live as someone that she wasn't and hide and like, protect her kids — and didn't want to embarrass her kids... for all this time.

"For her to sit in front of me and tell me, 'I think I love someone'. I mean, I really cried," he told the David Letterman Netflix show.

He said he had long known she was gay, but the pair only had their first conversation about it last year.

Their chat came about while Jay-Z was making his latest album 4.44.

"This was the first time we had the conversation, and the first time I heard her say she loved her partner," he said.

Will.i.am has led the fierce backlash against Kanye West after he claimed the enslavement of African Americans over centuries may have been a "choice".

The singer said it was "one of the most ignorant statements that anybody who came from the hood could ever say about their ancestors".

He also said Kanye's comments "broke my heart" and were "harmful".

Kanye earlier told TMZ: "When you hear about slavery for 400 years... for 400 years? That sounds like a choice."

He added: "You was there for 400 years and it's all of y'all? It's like we're mentally imprisoned."

He later tweeted to clarify that "of course I know that slaves did not get shackled and put on a boat by free will".

He added: "My point is for us to have stayed in that position even though the numbers were on our side means that we were mentally enslaved."

And then he claimed he was "being attacked for presenting new ideas".

That led to a wave of criticism from fans, fellow artists and others on social media - including the viral hashtag #IfSlaveryWasAChoice.

Asked about the comments on ITV's Good Morning Britain, Will.i.am said: "That broke my heart, because I thought about my grandma, who was born in 1920, and her connection with her mom who raised her, who was born in the late 1800s.

"And my grandmother's grandma, who was a slave. And when you're a slave, you're owned. You don't choose if you're owned. When you're a slave you're deprived of education. That's not choice, that's by force.

"So I understand the need to have free thought, but if your thoughts aren't researched, that is just going to hurt those that are still in conditions where it's not choice."

The musician said it "makes me want to cry that we're even talking about this" when there are problems in the world today that need addressing.

Will.i.am also said the comments seemed out of character for the Kanye he knows. "That's not Kanye," he said.

"To me, that's a different person that's saying that, and I hope it's not to raise awareness so you could sell a record and some shoes, because that would be the worst thing to do, to stir up this very touchy race situation and you be the benefactor from it.

"So I encourage you, if you really believe this, give your shoes away for free, give your album away for free. And I don't like talking about going against my community, but that is harmful."

He concluded: "I will not throw my ancestors under the bus to profit."

'WAKE UP'Others criticising Kanye included film director Spike Lee, who accused him on Instagram of making "uneducated comments" and urged him to "WAKE UP".

Lee wrote: "'SLAVERY... A CHOICE'??? My Brother, OUR ancestors did not choose to be stolen from mother Africa. OUR ancestors did not choose to be ripped of our religion, language, culture.

"OUR ancestors did not choose to be murdered, lynched, castrated, raped, burnt at the stake, families sold apart. OUR ancestors built this country (on land stolen from the Native Americans) from the ground up under the institution of SLAVERY."

On Twitter, musician Talib Kweli, wrote: "I will always have love for @kanyewest but bro out here putting targets on our backs. Slavery was not a choice."

An African-American history professor at North Carolina State University said in a Twitter thread that Kanye's remarks were "uninformed" and an "embarrrasment".

Referring to the star's 2004 album The College Dropout, comedian Romesh Ranganathan wrote: "Kanye West is an incredible advert for finishing college."

Musician John Legend, who got into an exchange with Kanye over his support for President Trump last week, retweeted a string of people criticising him.

They included civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson, who wrote: "Kanye's rhetoric continues to fuel the racist right-wing folks who believe that black people are responsible for their oppression."

However, rapper The Game came to his defence, calling Kanye "a genius". He wrote: "People who've never achieved greatness are not allowed to question it."

Is Kanye West stoking controversy simply to sell records? Yes and no.

The star returned to Twitter two weeks ago after almost a year away. That's pretty standard behaviour - lots of artists "go dark" on social media in the run-up to a new record, only to reappear in (what they hope is) a blaze of publicity when the release date draws near.

But West is instinctively a provocateur. He started to go off-message, tweeting about his admiration of Donald Trump and right-wing commentators who "challenge" conventional thought.

His subsequent statements online and on camera, including the extraordinary assertion that slavery might have been a "choice", have only stoked the controversy further.

But if this is all a marketing ploy, as Forbes suggests, it's backfiring spectacularly. Because unless I'm mistaken, alienating your fanbase isn't a commonly accepted principle of advertising.

All the same, West will use the controversy to fuel his music. After all, the song he released on Saturday, Ye Vs The People, which sees fellow rap star TI challenging his views, was apparently recorded just 48 hours earlier.

So he's reacting and creating in addition to provoking and promoting, which makes this a curiously compelling moment in music.

"I think he's trying to take people on a journey," said US radio host Ebro Darden, after speaking to West last week. "What I've expressed to him is that he better hurry up and get to his destination."

Since Kanye made the comments suggesting slavery was a "choice", a meme has developed on social media mocking the rapper's remarks.

The hashtag #IfSlaveryWasAChoice became the top trending topic in the US just hours after the TMZ broadcast.

Many have used the hashtag to create fictitious scenarios, where enslaved African Americans were working on plantations out of their own free will.

US entrepreneur Luke Lawal imagined a scenario where the cotton pickers have their Mac computer out in the field and are selecting their playlist for the day.

Others imagined a world where they worked hard to get to their dream slave position.

]]>webmaster@cbc.bb (Super User)ENTERTAINMENTWed, 02 May 2018 15:22:36 -0400Abba announce first new music since 1982http://cbc.bb/index.php/news/entertainment/item/4675-abba-announce-first-new-music-since-1982
http://cbc.bb/index.php/news/entertainment/item/4675-abba-announce-first-new-music-since-1982

Pop group Abba have returned to the studio to record their first new music since the 1980s.

The Swedish quartet said the new material was an "unexpected consequence" of their recent decision to put together a "virtual reality" tour.

"We all four felt that, after some 35 years, it could be fun to join forces again and go into the studio," the band said on Instagram.

"And it was like time stood still."

No release date has been set for the new songs - but one of them, titled I Still Have Faith In You, will be performed in December on a TV special broadcast by the BBC and NBC.

Abba's spokesperson Gorel Hanser described the new songs, saying: "The sound will be familiar, but also modern."

The studio sessions were "like old times", she told Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet.

"Easy as anything. It didn't feel weird that they hadn't been in the studio together for 35 years."

But Hanser said the group would not perform live, other than as holograms in the forthcoming Abba Avatar tour.

"No, you can not expect them to join forces on stage again," she said. "They will not do that."

The band have resisted pressure to reform since they stopped recording together in 1982, despite a reported $1bn offer for to tour in 2000.

In an interview with the BBC in 2013, Agnetha Faltskog said she preferred to leave the band in the past.

"It was such a long time ago, and we are getting older, and we have our different lives," she explained.

News of the new material comes in a bumper year for Abba fans. An immersive exhibition based on the band's career is running on London's South Bank, while Chess, the musical Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson wrote with Sir Tim Rice, is being revived in the West End.

A sequel to the film version of Mamma Mia!, starring Amanda Seyfried, Lily James and Cher, will be released on 20 July.

Speaking to BBC News, Rod Stephen, founder of Abba tribute act Bjorn Again, described the new material as "a whole new beginning".

"I heard about Abba releasing new songs and I was instantly, like everyone else in the Abba community, really excited to know what the songs were and how they're going to sound. Will it have that 1970s sound or will it be up to date?

"It's brilliant really, because we love Abba's music to death. I just hope they're great songs, I hope they're equivalent to Dancing Queen or Mamma Mia.

But, he added: "I know Benny and Bjorn wouldn't release something in this way unless they were good songs."

Formed in 1972, Abba were essentially a Swedish supergroup, consisting of songwriters Ulvaeus and Andersson from The Hep Stars and singers Faltskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad, who had scored success as solo artists.

But their joint project completely eclipsed their previous successes. After winning the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo in 1974, the band sold almost 400 million singles and albums around the world.

Mamma Mia!, the musical based on their hits and produced by Ulvaeus and Andersson, has been seen by more than 50 million people.

During their most successful period, the band survived marriage break-ups between Ulvaeus and Faltskog, and Lyngstad and Andersson, but they finally called it a day in 1983.

Their final recording sessions, in 1982, produced the hits Under Attack and The Day Before You Came, which featured on the compilation album The Singles.

Their last public performance came three years later, on the Swedish version of TV show This Is Your Life, which honoured their manager Stig Anderson.

A jury found Bill Cosby guilty Thursday of drugging and sexually assaulting a young woman at his home near here 14 years ago, capping the downfall of one of the world’s best-known entertainers, and offering a measure of satisfaction to the dozens of women who for years have accused him of similar assaults against them.

On the second day of its deliberations at the Montgomery County Courthouse in this town northwest of Philadelphia, the jury returned to convict Mr. Cosby of three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand, at the time a Temple University employee he had mentored.

The three counts — penetration with lack of consent, penetration while unconscious, and penetration after administering an intoxicant — are felonies, each punishable by up to 10 years in state prison, though the sentences could be served concurrently.

It was the second time a jury had considered Mr. Cosby’s fate. His first trial last summer ended with a deadlocked jury after six days of deliberations.

In recent years, Mr. Cosby, 80, had admitted to decades of philandering, and to giving quaaludes to women as part of an effort to have sex, smashing the image he had built as a moralizing public figure and the upstanding paterfamilias in the wildly popular 1980s and ’90s sitcom “The Cosby Show.” He did not testify in his own defense, avoiding a grilling about those admissions, but he and his lawyers have insisted that his encounter with Ms. Constand was part of a consensual affair, not an assault.

The verdict now marks the bottom of a fall as precipitous as any in show business history and leaves in limbo a large slice of American popular culture from Mr. Cosby’s six-decade career as a comedian and actor. For the last few years, his TV shows, films, and recorded stand-up performances, one-time broadcast staples, have largely been shunned and with the conviction, they are likely to remain so.

At his retrial in the same courthouse and before the same judge as last summer, a new defense team argued unsuccessfully that Ms. Constand, now 45, was a desperate “con artist” with financial problems who steadily worked her famous but lonely mark for a lucrative payday.

The prosecution countered that it was Mr. Cosby who had been a deceiver, hiding behind his amiable image as America’s Dad to prey on women that he first incapacitated with intoxicants. During closing arguments Tuesday, a special prosecutor, Kristen Gibbons Feden, had told the jury: “She is not the con. He is.”

The defense’s star witness was a veteran academic adviser at Temple, Mr. Cosby’s alma mater, who said Ms. Constand had confided in her in 2004 that she could make money by falsely claiming that she had been molested by a prominent person. Mr. Cosby paid Ms. Constand $3.38 million in 2006 as part of the confidential financial settlement of a lawsuit she had brought against him after prosecutors had originally declined to bring charges.

But Ms. Constand said she had never spoken with the adviser and prosecutors rebutted the characterization of Ms. Constand as a schemer. Perhaps most damaging to Mr. Cosby, they were able to introduce testimony from five other women who told jurors they believed they too had been drugged and sexually assaulted by Mr. Cosby in separate incidents in the 1980s. The powerful drumbeat of accounts allowed prosecutors to argue that Ms. Constand’s assault was part of a signature pattern of predatory behavior.

The case was the first high-profile trial of the #MeToo era. Candidates were required during jury selection to provide assurances that the accusations against scores of other famous men would not affect their judgment of Mr. Cosby. Mr. Cosby’s lawyers referred to the changed atmosphere in American society, warning it and the introduction of accounts from multiple other accusers risked denying Mr. Cosby a fair trial by distracting jurors’ attention. “Mob rule is not due process,” Kathleen Bliss, one of Mr. Cosby’s lawyers told the jury.

Then she spent much of her closing argument urging the jury to discount the accounts of the five supporting witnesses. One was a failed starlet who slept around, she suggested, another a publicity seeker. “Questioning an accuser is not shaming a victim,” she told the jury.

The remarks enflamed Ms. Feden, the prosecutor, who called the attacks on the women the same sort of filthy and shameful criticism that kept some victims of sexual assault from ever coming forward.

When Ms. Constand came forward to testify, she took the stand as something of a proxy for the other women, more than 50, who have accused Mr. Cosby of abuses, often with details remarkably similar to Ms. Constand’s account. A few of those women attended the trial.

None of the other accusations had resulted in prosecution. In many of the cases, too much time had passed for criminal charges to be considered, so Ms. Constand’s case emerged as the only criminal test of Mr. Cosby’s guilt.

But Mr. Cosby is facing civil actions from several accusers, many of whom are suing him for defamation because, they say, he or his staff branded them as liars by dismissing their allegations as fabrications.

The suits have mostly been delayed, pending the outcome of the criminal trial and are likely to draw momentum from the guilty verdict.

The case largely turned on the credibility of Ms. Constand, who testified that in a visit in early 2004 to Mr. Cosby’s home near Philadelphia, when she was 30 and he was 66, Mr. Cosby gave her pills that left her immobile and drifting in and out of consciousness. He said he had only given her Benadryl.

“I was kind of jolted awake and felt Mr. Cosby on the couch beside me, behind me, and my vagina was being penetrated quite forcefully, and I felt my breast being touched,” Ms. Constand said. “I was limp, and I could not fight him off.”

Adding weight to her accusations was the revelation that a decade earlier, in a deposition in Ms. Constand’s lawsuit against him, Mr. Cosby had admitted to having given women quaaludes in an effort to have sex with them.

But perhaps most damaging was the testimony by the five additional accusers, which took up several days of testimony. In Mr. Cosby’s first trial, last summer, only one other accuser had been allowed to add her voice to that of Ms. Constand’s. At the retrial, the accusers included the former model Janice Dickinson, who told jurors Mr. Cosby assaulted her in a Lake Tahoe hotel room in 1982, after giving her a pill to help with menstrual cramps. “Here was America’s Dad on top of me,” she told the courtroom, “a happily married man with five children, on top of me.”

The defense suggested in its cross-examination that Ms. Dickinson had made up the account and pointed to the fact that in her memoir she had recounted the meeting without making any mention of an assault. But Ms. Dickinson’s publisher testified that she had told her the rape account and it was only kept out of the book for legal reasons.

Another accuser, Chelan Lasha, told how Mr. Cosby invited her to his suite at the Las Vegas Hilton in 1986 when she was 17 to give her help with her modeling career. Mr. Cosby, she said, gave her a pill and liquor, and then assaulted her.

In court, Ms. Lasha, who was often in tears, called across the courtroom to the entertainer, who was sitting at the defense table.

“You remember,” she asked, “don’t you, Mr. Cosby?”

As in the first trial, Mr. Cosby’s legal team insisted Ms. Constand was lying about a consensual, sexual relationship. But while his lawyers last summer had depicted Mr. Cosby as a flawed man, an unfaithful husband who shattered his fans’ illusions, but committed no crime, his lawyers this time focused on the financial struggles they said Ms. Constand was experiencing that led her to to extort money from a man who had been trying to help her with a career in broadcasting.

“You are going to be asking yourself during this trial, ‘What does she want from Bill Cosby?’ And you already know the answer: ‘Money, money and lots more money,’” his lead lawyer, Thomas A. Mesereau Jr., told the jurors as he opened his defense of Mr. Cosby. “She has a history of financial problems until she hits the jackpot with Bill Cosby.”

The defense emphasized inconsistencies in the version of events Ms. Constand had given the police, saying, for example, at one point that the assault had taken place in March, 2004, then later changing that January 2004.

Mr. Cosby’s lawyers cited her phone records to show she had stayed in touch with him after the encounter and they produced detailed travel itineraries and flight schedules in an effort to show that Mr. Cosby did not stay at his Philadelphia home during the period she said the assault occurred.

“He was lonely and troubled and he made a terrible mistake confiding in her what was going on in his life,” Mr. Mesereau said.

Under cross-examination, Ms. Constand explained the lapses in her accounts as innocent mistakes, and said her contacts with Mr. Cosby after the incident were mostly cursory, the unavoidable result of her job duties.

Mr. Steele told the jury that with the pills he gave her, Mr. Cosby took away Ms. Constand’s ability to consent, and that their later contacts were irrelevant.

When Ms. Constand’s mother called to confront Mr. Cosby about a year after the incident, the prosecution argued, the defendant’s apology, and his offer to pay for her schooling, therapy and a trip to Florida, were evidence he knew he had done something wrong.

Kevin R. Steele, the Montgomery County district attorney, also worked to rebut the defense claims. He said that Mr. Cosby, a member of Temple University’s board of directors and the university’s most famous alumnus, set his sights on Ms. Constand, an employee in the university’s athletic department who considered Mr. Cosby a mentor.

“This case is about trust,” Mr. Steele had told the jurors. “This case is about betrayal, and that betrayal leading to a sexual assault of a woman named Andrea Constand.”